He breathed heavily through his nostrils and suddenly spun on his heel and walked back to his buddy. They whispered to each other, then took turns glaring at us.

“You get the feeling my temperament just isn’t right for this place?” Angie said.

We drove over to the Crab Shack for lunch. Again.

In three days, it had become our home away from home. Rita, a waitress in her mid-forties who wore a weathered black cowboy hat, fishnet stockings under cutoff jeans, and smoked cheeroots, had become our first pal in the area. Gene, her boss and the chief cook at the Crab Shack, was fast becoming our second. And the egret from the first day—her name was Sandra, and she was well behaved as long as you didn’t serve her beer.

We sat out on the dock and watched another late afternoon sky gradually turn deep orange and smelled the salt off the marsh and the gas too, unfortunately, and a warm breeze fingered its way through our hair and shook the bells on the pilings and threatened to toss our case file folder into the milky water.

At the other end of the dock, four Canadians with pink lemonade skin and ugly floral shirts scarfed platters of fried food and talked loudly about what a dangerous state they’d chosen in which to park their RV.

“First those drugs on the beach. Eh?” one of them said. “Now this poor girl.”

The “drugs on the beach” and the “poor girl” had been all over the local news the last two days.

“Oh, yuh. Oh, yuh,” one of the women in the group clucked. “We might as well be in Miami, and that is the truth, yuh.”

The morning after we arrived, a few members of a Methodist widows’ support group on vacation from Michigan were walking the beach in Dunedin when they noticed several small plastic bags littering the shoreline. The bags were small and thick and, as it turned out, filled with heroin. By noon, several more had washed up on beaches in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, and unconfirmed reports even placed some as far north as Homosassa and as far south as Marco Island. The Coast Guard surmised that a storm that had been battering Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas may have sunk a ship carrying the heroin, but as yet they hadn’t been able to sight the wreckage.

The “poor girl” story had been reported yesterday. An unidentified woman had been shot to death in a Clearwater motel room. The murder weapon was believed to have been a shotgun, the blast fired at point-blank range into the woman’s face, making identification difficult. A police spokesman reported that the woman’s body had also been “mutilated” but refused to specify how. The woman’s age was estimated at anywhere between eighteen and thirty, and Clearwater police were trying to identify her through dental records.